I received notification today that my upgrade copy of Panther shipped today. I’m guessing it’ll be here this weekend. In a surprising fit of caution, I think I’ll wait a few days to hear how the early upgrades go for other people before I do my own install. Very unlike me, but I really can’t afford arrows in the back right now from being a pioneer.
Latest Updates RSS
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Doug
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Doug
When I made it home from work, Mac OS 10.3 aka Panther, had been delivered. I managed to hold off until after dinner, but despite my earlier expressed intentions of holding off for a few days I couldn’t resist opening the package up and giving it a go.
Install went smoothly. I’d upgraded Unsanity’s Application Enhancer last night, and on first boot it disabled all of the AE modules I hadn’t upgraded yet. After upgrading the ones that are available I re-enabled them all - so far, no problems on that front.
Virtual Desktop initially appeared to work, but it quickly became clear that there were problems, specifically with Safari. I suspect it’s something relatively easy to solve, but I’ve decided to give Exposé a try for a few days. Who knows, I may like it better than a traditional virtual desktop arrangement.
So far, no problems with my most commonly used applications. More later as I have more time to test.
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Doug
For the past couple of years we’ve been contending with an ever increasing pile of remotes as we’ve expanded our home entertainment center. I did buy a programmable remote some time back, but it turned out to be a pain not only to program, but to use as well.
I’ve had my eye on a Logitech Harmony remote for a few months now. This past weekend I noticed Amazon had the Harmony 768 on clearance for $59.99 with a $10 rebate. At that price, they didn’t have to poke me with a stick to get me to order!
Briefly, this remote rocks. It does what it says it’ll do, and is a breeze to set up. It works with my Mac for programming, and when programming is done, turning on all the various components to watch TV or a DVD is a matter of pushing a single button. Good stuff!
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/strossonbritishsf.html
Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:47:48 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/strossonbritishsf.htmlBooks
Media
Politics
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
Charlie Stross has some interesting observations regarding the respective states of British and American SF writing. His post really struck home with me - I realized last week while in Borders that my current crop of favorite SF authors are all Brits. I can’t say I disagree with his reasoning,
Charlie Stross has some interesting observations regarding the respective states of British and American SF writing. His post really struck home with me - I realized last week while in Borders that my current crop of favorite SF authors are all Brits. I can’t say I disagree with his reasoning, either.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/fixingtheblogroll.html
Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:39:58 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/fixingtheblogroll.htmlTinderbox
Tips
Blogging
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
After limping along for a couple of years doing my blogroll very inefficiently in Tinderbox, I finally took the time this weekend to set things up right. It makes it a lot easier to manage links to sites, and is a good illustration of why it’s usually easier to break
After limping along for a couple of years doing my blogroll very inefficiently in Tinderbox, I finally took the time this weekend to set things up right. It makes it a lot easier to manage links to sites, and is a good illustration of why it’s usually easier to break things down into individual notes as often as possible.
The Tinderbox document I use for maintaining this weblog is a distant and much modified descendant of the original Simplicity weblog template. When originally setting things up I created a single note for my blogroll, as part of a section called “Boilerplate.” Every site I wanted listed in my sidebar was entered on a single line in this particular note, and then linked to the actual web site using Tinderbox’s linking facility. The “Boilerplate” group of notes is used to create the site sidebar, and includes not just the blogroll, but all of the other sidebar sections:
Note that this is a screenshot of how things are now; orgininally “Further Reading” was a single child note of “Marginalia,” containing all of my links to other blogs as described above.
All of the sections in “Boilerplate” were exported using a simple HTML export template I called “sidebar.html”:
<p class=”headline”>^title^</p>
^text^
^justChildren(sidebar.html)^
What happens here on export is a simple but important bit of Tinderbox magic - each of the notes that are children of the note “Marginalia” are exported using this template, and the export of Marginalia itself aggregates each HTML snippet from the child notes into the complete code for the sidebar, which looks something like this:
This, in turn, is included in other pages of blog by adding the following bit of export code to the export templates for every page where I want the sidebar to appear:
^include(Marginalia, sidebar.html)
The problem in my scheme was that my blogroll was, while easy to export, difficult to manage. A single note containing maybe a couple of dozen linked sites proved difficult to sort and reorder without a fair amount of manual intervention, since I couldn’t use some of Tinderbox’s own note sorting tools within the note itself. Worse, I had to be particularly careful when I added or removed sites or I could completely wreck the links.
The obvious answer, and the one I took a little time to implement this past weekend, was to have each site as a distinct note. That way, I could use Tinderbox to easily manage the list of sites. Adding and deleting site would be as easy as adding or deleting any other note, and wouldn’t wreck my other links.
To do this, I pulled the ‘Further Reading” note out from the children of “Marginalia” and made it a sibling, still under “Boilerplate.” I then created a “Website” prototype to use when creating new entries for my blogroll. This is a very simple prototype, containing only the attribute “URL” as a key attribute. This attribute is where we’re going to park the blog addresses in our new blogroll.
I then started creating child notes of “Further Reading,” one for each entry in my blogroll, each note using the ‘Website” prototype. The title of each note is the name of the linked blog as I want it to appear in my sidebar, and I paste the URL of each blog into the URL key attribute in each note. The result looks something like this:
All that remained was to integrate the new blogroll section of the outline into the export scheme for my blog. Doing so required a new, but still simple export template to grab the blog name and URL from each blog, format them correctly, and make them into a list.
To grab the title and URL from each note and format it as correct HTML, I created a very simple export template called blogroll.html:
<p><a href=”^Get(URL)^”>^title^</a></p>
Pulling these all together into a list is done by assigning yet another export template to the ‘Further Reading” note that tells Tinderbox to apply the blogroll.html export template to every child note of ‘Further Reading,” and then stack the results all up into a single HTML snippet. That template, furtherreading.html, is also pretty simple:
<p class=”headline”>^title^</p>
^justChildren(blogroll.html)^
Essentially, this is nothing more than a variation of the sidebar.html export template I’ve been using for years, just modified to use blogroll.html with all of the child notes.
Finally, I needed to get the result of all of this exporting included in the sidebar. Doing this is again just a variation on what I was doing already as described above. I just needed to add another ^include statement in the appropriate templates, like this:
^include(Further Reading, furtherreading.html)
which I inserted just after the original ^include statement I was using to create the original sidebar. Now, when I export my blog, I get a sidebar not much different from what I had before - but one where the blogroll is far easier to manage!
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Doug
I just discovered that Barnes and Noble have an excellent series of small hardcovers of classical literature known as the Barnes & Noble Collector’s Library. These paperback-sized volumes of great literature have cloth covers, sewn bindings, gilt-edged pages, a sewn-in ribbon bookmark, and retail for $4.95! I picked up six of them today for around $30, about what I would expect to pay for a single regular volume of any of these works.
If you’re looking to build a classics library on the cheap, or to have easily portable copies of your favorite classics that you won’t be afraid to toss into a backpack, you can’t go far wrong with the Collector’s Library.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/scottpriceonmontage.html
Sun, 24 Apr 2005 11:42:35 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/scottpriceonmontage.htmlTinderbox
Tips
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
Scott Price has an excellent post concerning how he uses Tinderbox, explaining a critical insight he gained at the last Tinderbox Weekend:
Montage is a part of my work, now. While I’ve been using palettes for some time in sophisticated applications like Photoshop, palettes serve a central window. It’sScott Price has an excellent post concerning how he uses Tinderbox, explaining a critical insight he gained at the last Tinderbox Weekend:
Montage is a part of my work, now. While I’ve been using palettes for some time in sophisticated applications like Photoshop, palettes serve a central window. It’s a montage of a central text with auxiliary, modifier windows. Since Tinderbox Weekend, I don’t tend to have a central window.
I’ve been using simultaneously open windows much more consistently. I keep an outline of my categories for this site open so that I can cross-reference new writing easily with links; definitions are open in another window all the time so that I can write a new one quickly when I realize I’m not being clear; since the references to further readings have been growing nearly geometrically, I’ve generally got a window open to my “pending readings” where I’m dropping URLs from the web.
None of these windows is particularly central. There used to be one privileged window in the center with an explorer view on the whole document, but since I’ve wanted to have more than one text window open at a time, that has fallen out of my routine. Now there are windows all over the place, and the connections between them are central.
I think working in this way, and not becoming wedded to a particular Tinderbox view, is a critical step towards “living in Tinderbox.” It takes a bit of getting used to at first, particularly if you’re coming to Tinderbox from a Windows background, where I’ve observed many users really stuck in the single, full-screen window paradigm. The benefits are huge, however, as Scott describes.
Updated 4/24/05 to include link to Scott’s post.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/ahiatusofthehiatus.html
Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:58:07 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/ahiatusofthehiatus.htmlPersonal
Blogging
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
Apologies, gentle readers, for my benign neglect these past months. Today is only the second day, not counting the Easter holiday, that I haven’t worked since returning from Tinderbox Boston in February. Most of those days have been 10 to 12 hour days as well, leaving little time for thinking,
Apologies, gentle readers, for my benign neglect these past months. Today is only the second day, not counting the Easter holiday, that I haven’t worked since returning from Tinderbox Boston in February. Most of those days have been 10 to 12 hour days as well, leaving little time for thinking, reading, and blogging.
Good for business, not so good for my mental health. I’m resolved to try and carve out a little time each week for writing. I suspect things here are going to move in a slightly more focused direction than in the past, since I have so little time these days. Expect things to be less eclectic, and more focused on what have traditionally been my core topics: Tinderbox, books, and work.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/realtorsandweblogs.html
Sun, 21 Aug 2005 16:44:00 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/realtorsandweblogs.htmlBlogging
Work
Technology
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
Dana VanDen Heuvel of blogSavant posts a screed today about Realtors needing weblogs, and Alwin wants to get my spin on it. Here’s the short answer - there’s no percentage in it, at least not yet.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s some real value in weblogging, orDana VanDen Heuvel of blogSavant posts a screed today about Realtors needing weblogs, and Alwin wants to get my spin on it. Here’s the short answer - there’s no percentage in it, at least not yet.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s some real value in weblogging, or I wouldn’t have been doing it for years. Having said that, I think the case for corporate weblogging as the be-all-and-end-all of the future of marketing is hugely overblown, and largely the product of marketing consultants looking to cash in on the latest fad. That’s not the reason I think blogging is a dead end for most Realtors (at least right now) though.
First off, let me say that I agree with Dana’s assertion that most agent web sites are sub par, and that most of the companies selling agents sites design and deploy very poor examples of the web designer’s craft. There are reasons for this, however, that I think are largely similar to why blogs are not a particularly wise investment for the average agent at this time.
Dana says: “Your blog could become a hub for home buyers - have a mortgage person or home inspector do some guest blogging with/for you. You’ve not just become the most popular agent in the county!” which is patently bullshit. I appreciate Dana’s enthusiasm for the medium, but it’s time to come down to earth a little. The reality is that only a very small portion of the population as of yet reads blogs. Fewer use tools like RSS aggregators that would let them easily read multiple blogs, something Dana’s strategy clearly requires.
The resource that is in shortest supply for me as a Realtor is time. My profession is one that requires first, a great deal of “face time” with clients, second, a great deal of solitary detail time handling paperwork and preparation (do you have any idea how much time it takes to select, put in order, and schedule showings on twenty homes? You don’t just jump in the car and drive around looking for houses with signs on them, ya know…), and third, a huge amount of follow-up time to keep deals on track and keep everyone in the loop about what’s going on. Somewhere in there, I also need to do marketing - and it is always a fight to clear even a couple of hours a week to do that. The time I spend on marketing therefore has to be extremely targeted and productive. Blogging covers too small and too dispersed an audience for it to be worthwhile versus other things I can do with that time.
Another issue with blogging is confidentiality. It’s against the law for me to share very much information about my clients with anyone else, so relating stories about clients and their experiences is mostly off-limits. That pretty much limits me to sharing tidbits about real estate practices (nearly all of which is already available on the web in some form or other), and blogging about listings, which is generally pointless because that information is also already widely available online.
In nearly every city and town in the US, the local Board of Realtors operates what’s called the Multiple Listing Service or MLS. The MLS is a centralized pool of all the listings that all the brokers in the board currently hold. In the past (before the web) MLS listing information was only available to agents, but today, every listing is available online through sites like realtor.com, the local Board web site, and the web sites of the larger real estate brokerages in a city - take a look at http://www.talktotucker.com for an example of what my brokerage does. Using our Mousetrak service, clients can enter their home search parameters on the site, and be emailed new listings matching those parameters every day - and email is far more generally available and accessible than RSS. Note that these are not just our listings, but listings from every broker in the greater Indianapolis metro area.
Dana seems to be operating under some serious misconceptions about how to make effective use of an agent. Much of what Dana seems to want to accomplish by asking Realtors to blog are services that most agents already offer - to their committed clients. Most of my clients don’t spend their time combing through listings looking for houses - I do that for them, carefully evaluating homes based on the parameters they’ve given me and my knowledge of the market. I then aggregate these listings together and email them to my clients for their review. What they get are very targeted results, rather than a huge blast of listings that have some of the characteristics they want, but most of which are completely unacceptable for other reasons. I assume that my clients are busy with their own businesses and families, and are paying me to do the grunt work - work I’m more qualified to do due to my experience and knowledge.
Dana also seems to be in the habit of working directly with listing agents. This is, to put it mildly, unwise. Real estate laws vary from state to state, but when you work directly with a listing agent without having an agent of your own, it is quite possible that you have no representation at all. For example, in Indiana a listing agent owes a set of very specific fiduciary duties to the seller, who is that agent’s client. However, the buyer is not a client of the listing agent (except in cases of limited agency), but rather only a customer, to whom the agent owes no fiduciary duties. The listing agent must be honest and fair when dealing with a buyer who is a customer - but if that buyer discloses any information, supposedly in confidence to the listing agent, that listing agent is in fact compelled under the law to disclose this information to the seller. Even in cases of limited agency it is likely that the agent has a closer relationship with the seller than the buyer, leaving the buyer at a real disadvantage.
Rather than trolling for agents with blogs, Dana’s time would be more wisely spent interviewing a few buyer agents, selecting one he feels comfortable with, and working closely with that particular agent to find the properties he’s interested in. The personal attention he receives along with the more targeted information he receives will be of far more value than what he would spend hundreds of hours trying to amass himself.
Of all of the clients I’ve had since I started as a REALTOR® almost two years ago, only one of them has known what a blog is - and he would have selected me as his agent due to our relationship whether I blogged or not. Further, over the next several years he’ll refer many clients to me, who will work with me due to their relationship with him and their trust in his recommendation. Working to maintain my relationship with that individual seems to me to be a far more effective use of my time than setting up a blog that reaches only a small number of people while replicating the services that are already provided in other ways on other web sites. It might not be as hip or cool to rely on a massive database driven web site that contains all the listings in the city as it would be to spend hours writing posts and making pod casts, but it sure as hell is a lot more lucrative.
Update: Roland Tanglao asks about Google rank and if that has an impact on a Realtor’s money making ability - in 2005, not a very significant one, at least not in the Indianapolis market. One of the great eye-openers for me in coming from a tech background into real estate is that the general public really doesn’t use tools like Google to the extent that we technologists do. The most common means for people to meet an agent is through a word-of-mouth referral, or because of wide-spread local name recognition (signs, direct mail, other local advertising). For example, I have a far superior Page Rank than one particular agent that lives in my neighborhood, and am certainly more well-known online than he is, or probably ever will be. He commonly lists 80% plus of the properties for sale here, while I’ve so far listed none. Everyone knows him because of his local marketing and reputation.
Beyond that, buyers are more likely to meet agents in Open Houses or just by calling in to the office and asking for an agent. It’s far more cost-effective for me to do an Open House, and far more likely for me to pick up a buyer client by doing so, than it is for me to blog about real estate. I did in excess of $1 million in business from Open Houses last year, while I have never had even a single lead from any of my online efforts.
That isn’t to say that things won’t change at some point, or that the situation might not be different in different markets, or that the public isn’t using online tools to shop for real estate (by and large, they are). Blogging just doesn’t yet seem to be a particularly effective means for me, in the Indianapolis market, to gain customers when compared to other marketing strategies. At best, I suspect it’s good for one or two deals a year - and those would have to be pretty significant deals to justify the time spent on blogging and the time lost on other pursuits.
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Doug
boingboing links to China Mieville’s 50 sf/f novels for socialists, and cite this passage. Mieville is a second-generation socialist:
Ayn Rand–Atlas Shrugged (1957)
Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive “objectivist” (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of “collectivism” is visible in this important an influential–though vile and ponderous–novel.
While I’m no huge fan of Rand and I found Atlas Shrugged nearly unreadable, I find it impressive (in a horrifying, watching a train-wreck sort of way) that the author of The Scar has the audacity to call any novel “vile and ponderous.”
This is a darn good bibliography though, of some excellent fiction. I was surprised at how much of it I’ve already read.
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/tinderboxweekendbost.html
Sun, 15 May 2005 19:24:07 -0500
http://www.doug-miller.net/blog/archive/tinderboxweekendbost.htmlTinderbox
Personal
Blogging
demiller@gmail.com (Doug Miller)
I have been absolutely buried playing catch-up after this past weekend’s excursion to Boston for the latest Tinderbox Weekend. I came back to a whole raft full of showings and other client activities that just haven’t left much time for blogging.
My lack of commentary thus far shouldn’t be takenI have been absolutely buried playing catch-up after this past weekend’s excursion to Boston for the latest Tinderbox Weekend. I came back to a whole raft full of showings and other client activities that just haven’t left much time for blogging.
My lack of commentary thus far shouldn’t be taken as a comment on the weekend - indeed, my Boston experience was a repeat of last October’s experience in San Francisco; it was simply fantastic. It’d be difficult to overstate just how much I enjoy attending these events, rubbing shoulders with other Tinderbox users, and hanging out with the Eastgate crowd. Toss in a fun old hotel where Alwin Hawkins and I had rooms on either side of the same hall, a great Tinderbox dinner Saturday night, some good face-to-face time with some of my favorite people, and some great presentations and Tinderbox ideas, and I was just about as pleased as I could be.
The Eastgate team really needs to be commended in how they put these things together. It’s tough to pull off small, intimate conferences multiple times per year, but they seem to do it. Mark Bernstein is not only a smart guy, but incredibly nice and it’s amazing how he makes himself accessible to the Tinderbox user community. I had the pleasure of meeting Barbara Bean this weekend for the first time, who is responsible for much of the “back room” stuff at Eastgate (actually, I understand that her domain is in the basement!), filling orders and making sure that a lot of the business stuff goes smoothly. Finally, Elin Sjursen is simply a pearl of great price, who not only gives a great Introduction to Tinderbox presentation, but always seems to be circulating amongst the crowd, making sure people have what they need, orchestrating logistics, and helping presentations come off right. These are people who are just a lot of fun to be around, and who probably don’t realize just how great they come off to others, both individually and as a group.
Alwin Hawkins gives me too much credit and is far too humble about his own presentation. If you ever get the chance to hang out with Al for a couple of days, jump at the opportunity. Being around him is good for your soul. We’ve spent enough time together now that we’re starting to riff off of each other, which seems to either be intensely amusing or horribly frightening to other conference participants.
Also, seeing Al’s reaction to his pouring of an entire cup of coffee into his PowerBook is an experience I’m glad I was on hand to see! The computer survived, but the curator of the excellent Armenian Library and Museum was a bit annoyed at us as we dripped coffee on his carpet while trying to sponge out the battery compartment.
It was also a lot of fun to meet Jeffrey Radcliffe, who has been to Indiana but got better and moved to Boston. Jeffrey is a regular Renaissance guy and a ton of fun to talk to. Barry Webster gave a great presentation on how he uses Tinderbox to produce class calendars, demonstrating a number of ideas that hadn’t occurred to me before. Rosemary Simpson has a ton of energy she’s putting into organizing all the Tinderbox manuals and documentation, and I think the outcome is going to be just spectacular. It was a real treat to spend some time with her and share some ideas around documentation issues.
Mark has put up some of pictures on Flickr, and created a tag, tinderboxweekend, for others to contribute their photos. Mark has blogged some comments on the weekend, as have Alwin and Jeffrey.
Once again, it was a really, really successful weekend, a ton of fun for me, and left me wanting more. I really want to thank Mark and Elin in particular for giving me such a great experience and really treating me like a king. Every time I leave, I leave eager for the next conference!
Over the next few days, I have some new sample files to put up, and hopefully, I’ll have time to write a few tutorials on some new Tinderbox tricks I’ve discovered. It’s gratifying to see that some of the ideas I shared this weekend are already being put into practice.
